• Café Life is the Colony's main hangout, watering hole and meeting point.

    This is a place where you'll meet and make writing friends, and indulge in stratospherically-elevated wit or barometrically low humour.

    Some Colonists pop in religiously every day before or after work. Others we see here less regularly, but all are equally welcome. Two important grounds rules…

    • Don't give offence
    • Don't take offence

    We now allow political discussion, but strongly suggest it takes place in the Steam Room, which is a private sub-forum within Café Life. It’s only accessible to Full Members.

    You can dismiss this notice by clicking the "x" box

Planet Spell Checker

Invest in You. Get Full Membership now.
Status
Not open for further replies.

Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2015
Location
Cornwall, UK
LitBits
0
I'm interested in learning if anyone knows where companies who produce writing software get their spell checkers from.

I'd have thought that to support their product, the spell checker would be of the highest quality, perhaps produced by, and bought from, an expert in dictionaries, such as Oxford, Collins or Chambers. This is hard to credit when I see the words my software queries. It would be easier to believe that spell checkers are based on an outdated children's dictionary acquired for a few pennies at a charity shop.

I use LibreOffice Writer to create my novels, as it's easier for me to understand than MS Word and more importantly is free! It has a thesaurus and an automatic spell checker, which I'm sometimes grateful of, other times irritated by.

Grammarly provides useful support, and I'm particularly glad of its punctuation checker as I tend to suffer from comma-itis! Its spell checker is just as elementary as LibreOffice. Words that I've typed recently, and which have been questioned, include track, moor, wizard, mauve and siphon.

I've added them to the spell checker's dictionary so that it doesn't query their use again. I well understand, why British novelist Will Self declared that the one thing he'd rescue from his burning house would be his laptop—not for the WIP—rather, to preserve his spell checker!

Occasionally, the software cautions me in a humorous way. Just this morning, I was writing about a dangerous guard dog, which my detective protagonist sees prowling the house of criminals he has under surveillance. When it barks, it reminds him of the Hound of The Baskervilles. Spell checker sprang into action, asking me 'Do you mean Hound of The Basketballs?'

12059b27a47972e344b2cc1533dc28b0.jpg


Googling spell checkers provides information on software that individuals can purchase, but do any cyber-savvy Colonists know who supplies makers of writing programmes?
 
People with small vocabularies, that's for sure. I, too, run across lots of words not in the spell checker. I do my spell check in MS Word, and they don't even have the names of Microsoft's own products in the dictionary. Don't even begin to ask the dictionary for the spelling of words like ocellus, scute, and ommatidium. Even common variations on words in the dictionary are often left out.
 
I use grammarly. Itś very useful. Although it's just pointed out that 'grammarly' is poping up as an error. :(
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Further Articles from the Author Platform

Latest Articles By Litopians

  • Hat Thieves Beware
    Summer 2017… schools and nurseries were closed for the holidays, and the grandkids were kicking th ...
  • Writer Beware
    I think AI is inundating my email inbox with author scams. Apparently AI is somehow gathering data o ...
  • Bad advice
    I’ve been on X again. I know, I know. I need to stop, but something keeps drawing me back. Maybe i ...
  • Farty Towels?
    I’ve always found it strange that often the first thing guests ask me, when I check them in is, ...
  • Consequential Detritus
    Mars 20,025 Xenoarchaeological Survey Team Epsilon for Galactic Central Command Captain Mandible? Ye ...
  • The Writer’s House
    Bristol is one of my favourite cities. I visit here a few times a year, and the second part of my no ...
  • The Song of Bert and Harry: The Name of that Pub
    “We went for a pub meal last night,” Bert suddenly announced. “Nice place, all done out with ...
What Goes Around
Comes Around!
Back
Top